Visual Culture – Page 3 – Weimar Studies Network

Women in Weimar Fashion

Mila Ganeva’s new study Women in Weimar Fashion. Discourses & Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 sheds new light on the role of fashion in the construction of female modernity:

‘In the Weimar Republic, fashion was not only manipulated by the various mass media – film, magazines, advertising, photography, and popular literature – but also emerged as a powerful medium for women’s self-expression. Female writers and journalists, including Helen Grund, Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, Elsa Maria Bug, and numerous others engaged in a challenging, self-reflective commentary on current styles. By regularly publishing on these topics in the illustrated press and popular literature, they transformed traditional genres and carved out significant public space for themselves. This book re-evaluates paradigmatic concepts of German modernism such as the flâneur, the Feuilleton, and Neue Sachlichkeit in the light of primary material unearthed in archival research: fashion vignettes, essays, short stories, travelogues, novels, films, documentaries, newsreels, and photographs. Unlike other studies of Weimar culture that have ignored the crucial role of fashion, the book proposes a new genealogy of women’s modernity by focusing on the discourse and practice of Weimar fashion, in which the women were transformed from objects of male voyeurism into subjects with complex, ambivalent, and constantly shifting experiences of metropolitan modernity.’

Fashion as Female Self-Expression

For her new book Wenn Frauen sich entblößen… Mode als Ausdrucksmittel der Frau der zwanziger Jahre, Sigrid Follmann analyzed fashion magazines of the 1920s to expose the discrepancy between the image of the ‘New Woman’ and the real identities of contemporary women. Follmann’s core argument is that women of the 1920s were struggling to cope with their new role in society and the resonsibilities this entailed.

>>> review (in German)

Leo Rosenthal, photographer

The Jewish photopgrapher Leo Rosenthal documented life in Weimar Berlin – from Hitler’s ‘Edenpalastprozess’ to football matches and doss houses. This new book gathers some of his best work between 1926-1933. A gallery of some photographs from the book can be found here.

(Thanks to Isabel Wagner for the link.)

Weimar’s Masculine Women

Drawing on recent developments within the history of sexuality, Katie Sutton’s The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany sheds new light on representations and discussions of the masculine woman within the Weimar print media from 1918–1933.

>> Review (in German History, 2/2012)

First World War Digital Collection – your help is needed

Europeana 1914-1918 is an international online digitization project funded by the European Union. Several libraries from eight European countries will digitize a selection of their holdings from World War I and unite them virtually. By the year 2014, the centenary of the outbreak of war, the project will make 400,000 outstanding sources from the time of World War I available online. Europeana 1914-1918 will also create a new virtual overview of materials and sources for historical research on World War I

For this project a questionnaire was prepared to consider the wishes and requirements of future users in the selection of materials and sources and the development of functionalities. The survey is intended not only to scientists but to all persons interested in the history of World War I. Europeana invites you to fill in this questionnaire to support the development of a comprehensive digital collection of First World War in the next few years.

August Sander Symposium

The National Galleries of Scotland are hosting a one-day symposium on “August Sander and Weimar Germany” on 13 May 2011. The symposium is organized in collaboration with the new VARIE Research Forum for German Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh.

Speakers include:

Dr Christian Weikop, University of Edinburgh
Professor Jill Stephenson, University of Edinburgh
Professor Erica Carter, King’s College London
Katherine Tubb, PhD candidate, University of Glasgow
Dr Sabine Kriebel, University College Cork
Dr Sarah James, University College London